Veritable Plethora things of a high interest nature

Sarah Palin Accepted $25,000 in Gifts as Governor

According to an article in the Washington Post, vice presidential "candidate" Sarah Palin accepted close to $25,000 in gifts including a "gold-nugget pin" worth $1,200 from the historic mining community of Nome. That year she approved $6 million dollars in funds to the city. She received some of these gifts after forwarding an ethics reform bill to the legislature.

Granted, gifts like "an Aleut woven basket, a sea otter headband, a Tlingit rattle and an Athabascan chief necklace" (collectively adding up to approximately $1,000), a $300 whale baleen basket, a $300 woven grass fan (is that made out of the kind of grass you weigh by the ounce?), and an ivory necklace worth $150 may seem quaint, folksy, and harmless, but if you were to glad-hand me a "$2,200 ivory puffin mask", I'd be ready to talk business with you Alaska ethics reform style.

I think what "Governor" Palin might have actually meant by reform was maybe reforming the type of gifts people in Alaska seem to give. It's like, hey guys I'm all for whalebone chotchkas and sea otter pelt tapestries, but how about giving me something I can use, ya know.

Read more about Palin's gifts.

In other Sarah Palin news, watch this video of her interview with Katie Couric. In one of her rare media talking appearances, Governor Palin gets field-dressed--err--gets dressed-down by the ever-feisty Couric. An interesting thing about this video is that you can watch as Palin shuffles through different talking points in her mind and excitedly lands on one that sounds like it might work.

Striking a de rigeur campaign pose, Palin drops a lot of rhetoric and doesn't really say anything even though her lips move a lot. I mean, a lot of words come out, but it's like, come on, answer the question robot-woman. She really struggles when confronted with the "I can see Russia from my state" comment in the second video here offering a stammering account of how Alaska is the entry point from Russia and how Putin "rears his head", but to her interviewer's credit, Couric generously helps Sar-Pal fill in the gaps and quickly moves on.

It would have been too easy.

Read more at this article in the New York Times.

Part 2